Teaching the late modern artist: From mnemonics to the technology of Gestalt. (Volumes I and II).
Item
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Title
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Teaching the late modern artist: From mnemonics to the technology of Gestalt. (Volumes I and II).
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Identifier
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AAI9007745
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identifier
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9007745
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Creator
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Deitcher, S. David.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rosalind Krauss
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Date
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1989
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Fine Arts | Education, Art | Education, Philosophy of
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Abstract
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This dissertation charts the persistence of idealism within the education of the modern artist. That said, the history of such training does not describe a continuous evolution of teaching methods that produce idealist results. Since the mid-19th century, the theoretical history of modern art instruction has consisted of an institutional negotiation between aesthetic and utilitarian structures. To isolate drawing instruction for artists from that used to teach designers, commercial artists, artisans or the general public is to perpetuate an artificial category, to disregard a historical dialectic, and to comply in the perpetuation of a modernist myth of high cultural autonomy.;Analysis of one introductory drawing course, which surfaced at Ohio State University in 1942, introduces a little-known manifestation of the late modern period. A confluence of aesthetic and industrial structures, it responded to varied historical forces: a Depression-era challenge to the idealist conception of art, demands for professionally trained artist-designers, and the influential emigration of Bauhaus masters to this country. The centrality of perceptual training to this drawing course, the psychological theories and mechanical practices that governed its application, and the belief in its capacity to improve everyday life opens onto an investigation of related themes and goals, which informed European drawing courses from the middle of the 19th century. The logic informing these courses is articulated in terms of a fragmentation of memory into conscious, "instrumental" memory and its unconscious, "aesthetic" counterpart. Thus, drawing courses intended for industrial and artistic applications exploited the resources of instrumental and aesthetic memory, respectively. Aesthetic memory secured for the early modernist the transcendental effect that perceptualism guaranteed for later modernists.;The union of aesthetic and industrial concerns, which characterized art teaching on university campuses before and just after World War II, ended when Abstract Expressionism's prestige heralded the return of aestheticism and traditional aesthetic hierarchies to art instruction. Nevertheless, that fleeting period of democratic pedagogical consolidation manifested itself in the artworks of a generation that was trained under its spell. Attracting international attention at the beginning of the 1960s for producing art that joined aesthetic and industrial structures, it included the central figures of American Pop art.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
